


cut pie

by mayachain



Series: 14Valentines_2019 [6]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Community: 14valentines, Domestic Violence, Dysfunctional Family, Episode Related, Gen, Introspection, POV Female Character, Season/Series 05, Trauma Olympics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 14:54:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17685608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayachain/pseuds/mayachain
Summary: After the events in "Family", Tara could not help but think about Faith.





	cut pie

**cut pie**

Willow’s parents had often ignored their daughter. No meekness, no grades, no brilliance had ever been enough to catch their eyes.

Xander’s parents had scorned him, disparaged him, in harsh tones at great volume. Louder still when one or both of them had been drinking.

Buffy’s father had left her. Had tried, in the beginning, to keep in touch, but had then all but forgotten her. Joyce had tried a bit harder, had loved her daughter, but even she had set an ultimatum and thrown her out of her house.

Tara would never consider the above injuries and decide they didn’t matter. They did. They did, and they had pulled the three together in a way that had nothing to do with the Slayer’s world, had made them family.

None of them knew what it was like to lie in bed in your own house and fear for your life. Oh, they knew all about fearing for their lives, but those were Slayer world fears. They came from the outside.

Willow’s parents paid for college. Xander’s less well-off parents let him live out of their cellar for rent. Joyce had embraced the daughter that came back from L.A., had once attacked a vampire with an ax.

Tara could only attend Sunnydale U because she had fought for it tooth and nail. Quiet, so quiet and so secret, secretly enough that her father and brother hadn’t known she was gone until it was too late.

Willow, Buffy and Xander – Giles, Anya, little Dawn and even Spike – 

She was a part of the Scoobie family now, most days she believed it, but it was because of Willow that she had a place. She loved Willow, she did, but love could not erase certainties that had taken hold of her brain.

Even as the others‘ parents’ failings became apparent with age and the rise of destiny, the illusion that parents provided safety still lingered on. 

Tara’s mind never connected her father with safety. Her mother, yes, even her brother for a precious few years. Her father – not once.

Faith’s father had never made her fear she was a demon. (She was a Slayer; there was actual demonic blood in _her_.) He had made her believe she was as worthless as her mother thought. She had been worthy of his fists the few times they’d met.

Tara had never truly met Faith at all, but from what she had heard, despite what she had done, what the others might think of her, Tara hoped the woman would return.

Her birth family had told her lies, so many lies, and they had shored up those lies with bruises. (The bruises she had let stand, but little Tara’s first ever act of defiance had been a whispered spell to help heal her own broken bones.)

She had never come across Xander’s mother, had only briefly been introduced to Willow’s. Anya’s mother was deceased thousand years hence, Spike had turned and staked his own. Joyce was the only mother any of them knew, any more. (Tara had no spell ready to cure cancer.)

Joyce had told of the girl that had briefly lived in her home. Tara had read the Watchers’ diaries pertaining to Faith Lehane. (Had Giles ever read the entries from the girl’s first Watcher, she wondered – it was all there, everything that had made Faith lash out and spiral once her barely-there trust was gone.)

If Faith returned, Tara thought but never said aloud… It would be nice to know someone who knew freedom like she did. Perhaps Tara could share the joy she had found standing on her own feet, making her own family. Joy in the freedom to just live.

 

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End file.
